


ashes of the other side

by medeia



Category: Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-26
Updated: 2014-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-14 17:40:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2200863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/medeia/pseuds/medeia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are no ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ashes of the other side

**Author's Note:**

  * For [harryhotspur](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=harryhotspur).



Afterwards, when Edward thought about it at all, what he remembered was not the body, sprawled stark and white against the too-small coffin, nor Henry’s interminable protestations of innocence, but rather Exton’s face, nightmarishly crestfallen, like that of a particularly ugly dog, who, on presenting his master with a dead rat, is confused by the violence of the man’s rejection. 

They buried Richard in Kings Langley, with all the solemnity and reverence due to the dead, but still irrevocably at Kings Langley and not at Westminster, where Richard had longed to be.   
***  
Fotheringhay in the first throes of March was bleak enough to suit Edward’s mood, all howling winds and parched frosts and no signs of promised spring. It took the edge off his despair, which said that he should throw himself on his lover’s grave, at his father’s feet, off the nearest cliff (somewhere in Norfolk probably, the relentlessly sensible part of his mind supplied) or else take up residence in some ruined tower, a desolate and abandoned heap of stone, covered in ivy and where owls nightly shrieked. Something desperate, to match deed to thought and catch the wildness of his mood, or else break out of it.

Something to seek redemption from, to unstitch time or deny it, deny the things that he had done and not done.

But if he did throw himself on Richard’s grave, men would call him mad, and if he threw himself at his father’s feet, his father would turn away, and if he threw himself off a cliff, or on his sword or drank poison, all he would achieve would be to damn his soul thrice over, and in any case, he didn’t suppose anyone would notice apart from his mother.   
Instead he went riding, trying to bury his thoughts, but was only reminded of the autumn, with its endless movement: each castle and each hill filled with a greater urgency to reach the next place, even before they returned from Ireland to find Bolingbroke already landed. And after, all the way to London, avoiding his father’s anxious glances, and trying to ignore the clouds of dust and abuse falling upon Richard’s head.

A frantic, frantic hunt, where the hart first chased the hounds, and then fled away, thinking itself safe to pursue its own folly, until surprised by the hunter and the hounds could fall to.

The longest winter of his life, he thought despairingly, and ignored the flowers on the ground, the buds on the tree. As if the winds that winter had cut him to the heart, chilled him past the bone – but no, that he’d done himself.  
***  
On the days that Edward did not ride out, he shut himself in the solar with only his thoughts for company. Thoughts which knotted in on themselves, produced strange twists so that they went round and round in the same direction but came out with a sharper edge each time, until he could only try to cast them away, which left him with nothing to do but stare at the fire, at the walls, at his hands, dull and rough from riding.

Richard had had beautiful hands, long and tapered with no tiltyard calluses. In Edward’s own bearish grasp they had looked faintly ridiculous, rough paws grasping at a king’s. But they had always looked somewhat incongruous together; Richard long and lean, Edward shorter and broader, like some hulking mastiff stood next to a greyhound.  
***  
The last time he had been alone with Richard had been in a room in Wales, in some dank castle, and there desire had been overlooked in an attempt to offer his cousin what wretched comfort he could.

It had done no good; one of Richard’s long hands had fleetingly traced his face, there had been an absent kiss pressed to the side of his face, his other hand draped distractedly over Edward’s shoulder. There had been comfort, of a sort, to be found there too, but he had none of his own to offer unsolicited, and after a moment his cousin had sighed and turned away.

If he’d known – he had known, though, somewhere beneath the layers and lines of helplessness, that what was bearing down on them would be no less than devastating, and even then, he had heard somewhere in his head the word deposed and known that for Richard, to be no king was to be dead, and less than dead. For I must nothing be, he’d said later; for with the crown there were two Richards, private and public, the king-and-state, and then the man, and without – no man at all.

There had been one more night, of cold kisses and colder comfort, and as they went down to where Bolingbroke waited impatiently, a last embrace; a kiss to the cheek, the hand, the mouth, and then no more.  
***  
They followed Bolingbroke to London, and Edward found himself turned traitor, bought by his father’s promise and caught on the other side. Even then – if Edward had listened to his father, stayed silent and allowed himself to rest on that first betrayal, that first swapping of sides, it would have been only that one betrayal, incidental, caught in the wake of Henry’s ambitions, and his father’s confused vestiges of paternal affection. A sin of omission, of failing to speak out and protest the usurpation of the king, and only that.

But he had been there when they forced his cousin to resign the crown, and Richard had looked like a haloed saint, a gilded angel, for all the filth of travelling, and so Edward had invoked conspiracy, and it had come when called, and, then, like the worst kind of traitor, he had been unable to follow it through.

He might have salvaged it, even when his father’s hands were grasping for the bond, he might have thought more quickly and lied – it’s from Constance, father, from my loving sister, or, oh, it is from the Abbot of Westminster; he wishes me to dine with him on such-and-such a night. But both cut too close to the truth, his sister’s husband as embroiled in the conspiracy as the Abbot, and his father knew, Edward saw it in his eyes and he had snatched it already, before Edward could open his mouth, and read it, in one gasping moment. The world fell away, so that his father’s look had to pierce through – treason. Treason, oh my son, my treacherous son, no son of mine… (but who played the traitor first, father?)  
Richard had died for that. No one had said it to his face; he had only thought it, looking at Henry’s pale face, his hands moving as he spoke, as if he were already trying to wash the blood off his hands before he got anywhere near the Holy Land. Richard had died for Edward’s instance of soul-blistering stupidity, his desire to save his own skin. Richard had died, and so had the other conspirators, which left some eight souls on Edward’s conscience.

Traitor twice over, then, almost-regicide from the one side, and a sort of Judas from the other, a murderer-by-proxy.  
***  
Call it despair, then, and have done, he thought. Damningly, he was in good health, his sleep heavy for all the violent visions of the night. He dreamt of Richard’s hands, not as in life, but in death, bent awkwardly to fit in the coffin, and of the two wounds on his right side, the third on his chest. He remembered kissing those hands, the fingertips, and then the neck, and how Richard had held back laughter as he did so, and then kissed him full on the mouth.

He had left court the day after Richard’s funeral, fled away from the shattering glances his father kept sending first his way, and then the king’s, as if he is not sure that he understands either of them anymore, and from the whispering courtiers, the Percys with their wolves’ eyes, the gaze of a beast before the kill. And from the sight of Bolingbroke in state, receiving court from men on bended knee, the forced reminder that Richard was dead and buried, and how that had been done.

There had also been the thought that he might find it easier to forget, away from court.  
***  
The sight of deer in the forest reminded him of hunting with his cousin, of riding miles and miles after the hart with the king at his side. At any odd hour, when he heard footsteps, he still half-expected it to be summons to the king, as if none of the past year had happened, as if Richard were still alive and king, as if Edward were still the favourite of a king. 

He had heard said that murdered men haunt their murderers; surely he, who had more than a part in Richard’s death, should be haunted by more than his thoughts, more than the whisper of a memory of hands and a kiss. 

At night, he listened for steps by his door, he waited for the snatch of a voice, cold lips pressed to his.

Waited, and waited, and waited.


End file.
